Tag Archives: property values

By almost every measure, San Francisco’s economy boomed during Mayor Ed Lee’s six-year tenure, adding jobs, companies, housing and office space. Of course, that also exacerbated the city’s well-known issues: income disparity, congestion and transportation, and lack of affordable housing.

Whoever takes over at City Hall will inherit a vastly different climate than what Lee faced in January 2011 when the city and country were emerging from a brutal recession and local unemployment stood at 8.9 percent, higher than it was during the dot-com bust. It’s now an impressive 2.7 percent, among the lowest in the country.

San Francisco under Lee became even more of a mecca for technology, cementing its cachet as the nation’s startup capital. The number of venture-backed startups here more than doubled during his administration, while the number of tech jobs tripled.

San Francisco and Silicon Valley don’t have a hard border, or even a soft border,” said Terry Connelly, dean emeritus of Golden Gate University. “They’re one and the same. That’s a big change, and that happened under Ed Lee.”...(more)

The legacy of Mayor Ed Lee includes the huge impact his enthusiasm for sports and arenas had on the culture shift in San Francisco away from liberal, progressive humanitarian politics toward a much more competitive reach for gold. The increase in the tax base through fast-rising real estate valuations, has not been sufficient to off-set the damage done to our most vulnerable citizens who are losing their homes as the wealthy flood in to displace them. Solving this conundrum will be the job of the next mayor. San Francisco citizens must demand a plan of action before choosing the next Mayor as this will be the most important task. All candidates should prepare to show us their plans.

Loosen zoning restrictions and you get higher land values — but there’s another approach, and it’s not really all that crazy

Every time a big market-rate housing project is dropped into a working-class community, she noted, evictions and rents go up all around it. After the Monster in the Mission was proposed (not even built), she said, tenants from all over the area were in her office complaining about rent hikes and eviction threats.

“If we get ten affordable housing units, and 100 people are displaced, we didn’t get shit,” she said.

I argued that, in fact, if done right, restrictive zoning brings down property values – which ought to be the point. And I had a two-word solution to the money problem: Tax Zuckerberg…

Zoning is a tool that communities can use to direct what types of land uses go where. It’s also, potentially, a way to change land values.

Let’s look, for example, at the Eastern Neighborhoods of San Francisco. Until fairly recently, much of that land was zoned only for industrial use; in the 1980s and 1990s, housing – presented as “artist live-work” housing – started to get approved.

That made the land more valuable: Production, Distribution, and Repair – the PDR that planners talk about – typically can’t afford the same rent per square foot that people looking for market-rate housing can. So warehouses and print shops and small factories found that the rent was going up so high that they had to leave, at which point those buildings were demolished and turned into housing.

Then the city planners created what’s known as Urban Mixed Use, a zoning category that allows housing, offices, and PDR. Guess what: Offices, particularly tech offices, command rents as much as ten times as high as PDR can pay, and condos are at about the same level.

So the owners of every site that could be offices or housing saw their land values increase dramatically. No surprise they got rid of PDR tenants in favor of higher-paying uses…

If you zone areas exclusively for PDR, and you don’t allow any exemptions, and you enforce the law, then you suppress the increases in land values that you see under the current zoning. If you are forbidden by law to rent your space to anyone who can pay more than $4 a square foot, your land is worth less than if you can rent it for $40 a square foot.

Let’s remember: We were never talking about taking high-value land and downzoning it. All of those landowners bought the property under the old, more restrictive zoning, and paid a price that reflected that.

So by changing the zoning, we increased land values and drove out one sort of use in favor of another…

Suppose we take zoning more seriously.

Suppose the Planning Commission creates a new category of zoning – Below Market Rate Housing – and defines it to mean housing that is priced for people making between 20 and 70 percent of the neighborhood median income. Then the commission applies that zoning to every vacant site in the city, and every site that is occupied by an abandoned business.

In a sense, in a much more limited way, that’s what the Peskin-Mar legislation does: It allows more density, but as part of that bargain limits the use to 100 percent affordable housing.

In my broader scenario, the land where the new BMR zoning applies can no longer be used for luxury condos. Its value drops…

So how the hell do we pay for that? It’s a question that we ought to be demanding that Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton answer. Because the housing crisis in SF is not unique – Los Angeles has tens of thousands of homeless people, New York is a disaster, Portland and Seattle are seeing problems … urban housing is a serious problem all over the country…(more)